DataSift teams with Bitly to show what social content really gets clicks

Social data platform DataSift, one of two companies with access to Twitter’s firehose, is teaming with link shortener Bitly to help its customers understand what content is actually clicked on and read, not just shared and retweeted.

Marketers spend a good chunk of their money on content marketing but when it comes to measuring how well that content is doing, it often comes down to counting tweets, retweets, posts, comments and likes. By tabulating friends and followers, marketers can estimate how much reach a message had. But it’s still harder to know what content is really getting clicked on and read the most.

By partnering with Bitly, which is used to share 80 million new links a day, DataSift can help its clients look at social conversations and click data together. That allows them to see what content actually drives the most interaction. This gives brands a way to create content that’s really engaging for users and also have a better way to measure their “return on influence.”

“Now, with Bitly, you don’t just look at links but you look at content. Now you can see who is engaging with stories and you can see which bits of news are resonating. Just because something was retweeted doesn’t mean someone clicked on it,” DataSift’s founder and CTO Nick Halstead told me in an interview. “This will change the perception of success.”

DataSift customers can now pull up live data on what stories are being shared and how many clicks they’re actually getting. They can filter by geography and see where the referrals are coming from and what keywords and titles are working. A company can now apply some SEO techniques to come up with new content that matches what people are clicking on or rework existing content and headlines to maximize engagement.

Halstead says the partnership makes sense for both companies. DataSift has a critical way to provide link analytics on social content while Bitly has a way to get more use out of its data and it can sell DataSift customers on its data stream. DataSift now has 300 big enterprise clients and just raised $15 million earlier this week led by Scale Ventures.